


Smoke

by BannedBloodOranges



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Caesar's Legion, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Nipton, Violence, fateful encounters, good karma courier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:26:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23170159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BannedBloodOranges/pseuds/BannedBloodOranges
Summary: Vulpes encounters the Courier at Nipton, and precedents are set.
Relationships: Male Courier/Vulpes Inculta
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	Smoke

**Author's Note:**

> Non-profit fun only. 
> 
> Meet Donny, everyone.

Finally, the fires had died down. Crackled flesh and charred rubber were pungent about them, scar tissue smoke trails gulped up by the sky.

Even out in the Mojave sun, the hard light had not touched Vulpes, coarsened his skin into a hard shell of tan. His curdling skin made him glow beneath the sun-bleached rot of the Mojave. How he must have looked, descending the steps to the scum of Nipton. Like a judgement, perhaps, a reckoning in cold flesh form. Not a God. Only Ceaser bore that title. 

The child that sat blinking up at him could not have been birthed anywhere else but on the wretched earth. He was small, stringy, more a woman than anything that could resemble a man, even with the hardwire of muscule and malnutrition in his body, his tiny pupils' peals of terror. In his sweat wet hands, he pulled at a holstered pistol and obviously had no understanding about how to use it.

"This," Vulpes declared, proud. "...was a town of whores."

The boy looked up about him, at the still squirming almost corpses, the tyre fire smoking black into the heavens. Disgust overtook his hesitance, if only for a moment, and Vulpes smirked. He was not exactly impressed - even a doting mother could not be touched at that embarrassment of a man - but he was surprised if only a little.

"They didn't deserve that," He stood up, slowly. He held out his hands; unarmed. Vulpes commended his nerve. "This was evil."

"And what is evil?" Vulpes bit back. It was as much a warning as it was a reply. His Legionaries were scouting close, circling the boy. Their eyes grew fat on his back and legs and disgust crawled unbidden into Vulpes's throat, and at the hiss in his voice, they retreated, heads down, hands behind their backs. Good. "This town, which offered no loyalty to either side, who would have happily stood by and watched their neighbour slaughtered for a tiny chance at life? That they were so devout to the acquisition of caps that they agreed for me to spring a trap upon their so-called allies before they realised that they had also wandered into the net?"

The boy's lower lip trembled, but he bit it bloody, tightening his brow with misguided feeling.

"There are innocents everywhere," He replied, quietly. 

"We spared the children if that is what you are inferring," Vulpes said, dismissive. "We have recruited them into our numbers. From now on, they shall have a purpose."

The children sat in the thick wicker cages, burbling to each other. A thickset girl, barely on the edge of appropriate breeding age, cradled her broken hand. She had spat when one of the Legionary men had felt her breasts for their maturity. She craned around the smaller children, like a viper ready to strike. Vulpes considered having her shot before they set off back to the Fort. By the looks of her, she was to be no more than trouble. That, or he could have her tongue cut as an example.

"You enslaved them," The boy spoke. He'd risen fully now, staring eye to eye at Vulpes, who appraised him, bored. The boy was young, he suspected, and with a dull heat, he could see the man child had an awkward beauty. If Vulpes could believe such a thing could exist, he could contest the boy was almost pure.

"We have liberated them into a greater purpose, a future that promises glory, a prevailing of the strong." Idly, he untied the leather strap that served as the boy's holster, and he smiled as the young man slunk back from his touch, appalled, but Vulpes merely strengthed the strap, pulling it sharp and correct across the boy's hip. The young man's ribs pushed out with his exhale, and even in the fragility of the action, it was with a tight, assured strength and Vulpes rumbled bemused in the back of his throat. "Come to the Fort, little wanderer. Come and see your future, behold our truth. Your silence determines your curiosity. I will not deny you the opportunity to serve a worthy cause, even as hesitant as you are."

Laughter weighed the air around them. The young man shoved Vulpes away, who held up his hands in a mirror of the boy's earlier action, and as the smoke died around them, he called for his Legionaries to depart.

* * *

The sun swelled, burst, bled out across the sky as they neared their base. The spear of the Strip scoped the horizon and Vulpes, blissed by the right of the blood he had lain into the earth, could almost see the hot cut of the Legion's flag fluttering softly in the breeze.

A cry broke his reverie.

Vulpes barely had time to shout, to turn, before the knotted tusk of a Big Horner rutted the air mere inches from his chest. With a curse, he slit the beast's throat with a dash of his ripper, and the blood spurted hot and fresh across his knees, slicking up his cheek and matting into the side hang of his headdress. 

They were swarmed by the beasts. A stampede, Vulpes thought, and even as dumb and disorderly as the animals were, they were dangerously aggressive if roused.

"Calm!" He called out. But from the staccato of a gunshot, he knew it was too late, and the passing body strike of a female calf threw him into the dust.

He came up for air, spitting out sand and the iron gristle of a dislodged tooth, and through the smoke in his eyes, he saw a figure against the bowing sun.

It was the boy. In one shaking hand was a cattle prod, sweat running rivers down his head and back, boots filthy from where he'd tracked them. Behind him lurked the shadows of the Nipton brats, their parent's sins sunken into the whites of their eyes, and of course, the baby whore, peering out at the carnage with hunger, teeth borne wolf white and the boy's pistol hung from her dirty little hands.

But Vulpes caught the boy's stare, and held it, his nerve steel cold against the young man's weeping fear, but despite that, despite it all, what with the sun and the brats and the bellows of his trampled men, the boy looked back, until the stars came out into the sky and doused him from Vulpes's sight.

An hour passed until the remaining men hobbled to Vulpes's side, who had been sure to stand upright, carving the constellations from the sky. His mother had taught him. Naturally, it had little worth now, except to wait out other's incompetencies.

"Mighty Inculta," The Legionary whispered through his fractured jaw. "Where shall we go now, sir?"

Vulpes stared at the dent of their disappearing dust trail. He took a long drink of his canteen and refused the healing powder offered by the trembling recruit.

"To the Fort." He turned away from the makeshift path, the stars, the dried black clung to open rib and skin. The geckos had already begun to feed. "To Caesar. There is much to tell him."


End file.
